Locating temporary waste treatment facilities in the cities to handle the explosive growth of HCWs during pandemics: A novel Grey-AHP-OCRA hybrid approach

The COVID-19 outbreak has not only put the community health at stake but, also the environmental health. Usually, the healthcare wastes (HCWs) are composed of 15-20% of the infectious wastes and the rest of the non-infectious wastes. But, during any communicable health outbreak like COVID-19, the whole HCWs coming from the infected people become contagious. During the COVID-19 outbreak, the infectious waste is not only limited to the hospitals’ premises, but also comes from the households, where COVID19 infected people are under home quarantine. Hence, keeping in mind the explosive growth in generation rates of infectious HCWs, the present study targets to expand the treatment and disposal capacity by installing temporary healthcare waste treatment facilities (HCWTFs). The study identifies ten criteria from the literature review and in consultation with the field experts, to evaluate the potential candidates for setting up temporary HCWTF during the health outbreaks. The study proposes a hybrid methodology based on grey analytical hierarchy process (G-AHP) and grey operational competitiveness rating analysis (grey-OCRA) for prioritizing the evaluation criteria and selecting the optimal temporary HCWTF location by considering the experts’ inputs, respectively. The stakeholders consider the ‘proximity to the inhabitation’, ‘infrastructure availability’, and ‘transportation distance’ are the most important criteria for selecting the temporary HCWTF location. The proposed methodology is applied to select the temporary HCWTF location in Sundargarh District, Odisha, India. The study identifies the four locations by using geographical information system (GIS) tools and sequences them as per the preferences given by the stakeholders on various identified criteria. The study may be useful for the administration to set up the temporary facilities to quickly dispose of the extra HCWs during the pandemics. However, the future studies can be targeted to coordinate the collection, storage and transportation activities with the temporary HCWTFs.